

This paper aims to diagnose UK's construction industry to develop a clear understanding about BIM adoption and to form an imperative step of consolidating collective movements towards wider BIM implementation and to provide strategies and recommendations for the UK construction industry for BIM implementation. The identification of the challenges and barriers is therefore an imperative precondition of this change process. The results of the implementation show that the EvacuSafe is a valuable tool for evacuation design and planning that provides a more comprehensive evaluation of the evacuation performance in comparison to the existing indices and safety measures in the industry.īuilding information modelling (BIM) implementation is a major change management task, involving diversity of risk areas. The development of the framework, the risk indices, and the IFC-based integration is illustrated and validated through a case study on a two-story office building with 59 compartments. Other unique advantages of EvacuSafe include the seamless integration of fire dynamics simulation, agent-based crowd simulation and building information models (BIM) using IFC data structures, allowing EvacuSafe to be readily used by designers to analyze a building layout design under various fire scenarios and for layout design optimization based on multiple safety criteria. Contributions of this research include the development and validation of two spatiotemporal risk indices to quantify the safety of the egress routes and individual building compartments.


In this research, EvacuSafe is developed as a tool for designers to allow for layout optimization of buildings and facilities in terms of their evacuation safety performance. Despite recent technological advancements in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries, the number of fire-caused fatalities in residential and commercial buildings in the United States over the last decade has consistently been an order of magnitude higher than fatalities caused by all other types of natural disasters combined.
